This interdisciplinary day conference will investigate representations of the human body as a site of cultural and political debate during the long eighteenth century. Papers will explore how it was possible to produce representations of the body and its operations at this period, and what were the political implications of such representations.

During the eighteenth century, medical accounts of the body often constitute sites of peculiar tension between enlightenment celebrations of progress and older, occult folkloric traditions, and between the rigours of empirical investigation and the necessity of visionary speculation. Medical texts are often marked by political division and debate, as medical advances are heralded as evidence of radical political progress, while also functioning to entrench essentialised conceptions of gender and racial difference.Our speakers will not only address the medical literature of the period, but will investigate the significance of medical debates in literary, philosophical and political texts. Conference papers will discuss the significance of literary conventions in medical representations of the body, in particular the use of the conventions of narrative, and the highly figurative qualities of medical texts. But they will also explore the way in which medical theories are used to underpin aesthetic, social and political speculations during this period.

The conference has been generously supported by the British Society for the History of Science.

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2017-11-10T09:54:08+00:00 February 4th, 2013|Conferences, Symposia & Workshops|Comments Off on Medical Matters: the cultural politics of the body in eighteenth-century Britain, University of York, 9 March 2013